Tuesday, April 29, 2014

We Heart Furniture

When we started saving money for our down payment and planning to buy a house, we made it our goal to save enough so that we'd also have money to fill our house with furniture. Wouldn't that be nice right!? Wellllll, things didn't exactly turn out that way. Buying a house is kinda pricy. And when I say 'kinda', i mean 'really'. Even after lots of planning and saving, we greatly underestimated all the costs involved. We didn't exactly factor in the need for a new refrigerator and washer/dryer, and we didn't think about the must-have items we'd have to purchase right away such as ladders, hoses, and lawn mowers. They ate away our budget like a fat kid at a buffet. As a result, for the last few months our house has looked really bare. I'd say only half the rooms in our house had any furniture. It practically echoed in here. While we are so fortunate to be at a place in our lives where we can purchase the house of our dreams, we know it comes with lots of challenges (and Benjamins) to make the house our home, so we keep reminding ourselves to be patient. It's so easy to get wrapped up in owning your first home that you want everything to look perfect right away, and that's not always realistic. We're learning to become content with the fact that making renovations and buying furniture are all in a marathon of home ownership, not a race.

That being said, after six months of living in our house we finally purchased a few pieces of furniture. Holla! It's beginning to look less ghost-towny in here.We still have LOTS of furniture and decor to purchase (we're very sorry to our guests who have to stay on our air mattress when they come over) but we've made some progress, and I'm here to share.

Home Office
I am lucky to work in the contract furniture industry so I was able to furnish my office for free. Can't beat that! Our showroom in Dallas was updating their samples, so I was able to snag a desk that they would no longer be using.

The desk and side chairs are courtesy of DARRAN furniture. The task chair is courtesy of Neutral Posture.

Other than the furniture, we haven't touched this room so we still have tons of work to do in here. It sure does help working from home though, when you have a place to work.

Kitchen
Almost every time we have people over, we congregate in the kitchen or living room, so we knew barstools would be well worth our first furniture purchase. We both gravitated towards the industrial style swivel stools so we were on the hunt to find a deal. We first fell in love with the stools at World Market, but they don't adjust high enough to be a true bar height stool.

We of course love the West Elm version but they're more expensive than we were wanting to spend.

I was casually looking on Craigslist and found two stools for $75 each that were absolutely perfect. They were taller than most industrial stools we found, and the seats were darker which we liked. I asked the guy on Craigslist where he bought them so that I could go buy two more matching ones. You'll never guess where he got them...Gordman's. I didn't even know they had furniture. (For all you Texas peeps, Gordman's is like Kohls but a little less expensive). I drove over to Gordman's that same day to check out the sitch, making sure they still sold these stools. Turns out, they were only $99 and they had a 20% off coupon. For those of you who didn't graduate from 2nd grade, that's only $80 each! Why would I ever buy $75 used stools from Sketchy McSketchter on Craigslist when I can buy them brand new for $80? I tried striking a better deal by letting Mr. McSketchter know that they were on sale for only $80 but he wouldn't budge on his price. His loss. So off to Gordman's we went to buy our 4 stools.

Devin and I are uhb-sessed with how they turned out. Bear is too.

Dining Room
I saved the best for last. For almost five months, it practically looked like no one lived here when you walk in. If you're entering our front door, you immediately see the formal living room straight ahead and the dining room to your right...both of which have had no furniture. That had to change. We were searching on Craigslist for dining sets almost every day but nothing was catching our eye. Had we been looking for country style 1980's oak tables, we could have had one months ago, but those don't exactly butter our biscuits. And then finally we found the ONE. I'll let the pictures do the talking.

We just need some new artwork and an area rug to call this room complete.

We found this gem at Hobby Lobby, on sale for 50% off. We are in love.

Eventually, I'd like to get two accent upholstered chairs at each end of the table, but the contrast in fabric colors does the job in the mean time.

We love how it looks in the space. We got the table and all 8 chairs for only $300. Not too shabby! It did take some work to look this good though, including reupholstering the chairs and touching up some scratch marks. You'll have to wait until the next post to find out how we did it!